Look, I wasn't going to review this book. I don't do book reviews. I don't have the time. I mean, do you know how long it takes to read a book? But when it turned up I couldn't bear to send it back. It was just so beautiful. So desirable. It's the type of book you want two copies of - one to read and the other to lock away in a vault. It comes wrapped in a full-colour poster designed to look like an American newspaper comics section, and tucked into that are two mini-comics. Then there's the book itself, which boasts a gold-embossed jacket, endpapers showing scores of comic characters (like those lovely old hardback Tintin books which had a gallery of characters at the front, and you'd tick off the ones you recognised) andhundreds of pages of lovingly reproduced comics, many in full colour. American comics. Grown-up comics.

For this edition of McSweeney's , Dave Eggers has handed the controls to cartoonist Chris Ware, and his inimitable stamp is all over it. A few years ago I was on the judging panel that awarded the Guardian First Book prize to Chris Ware's "comic" book, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth. I argued quite strongly for it because I figured the award was for the best first book - not the best first novel or book of poetry or biography or whatever, the best first book. And, as a book, Jimmy Corrigan was in a different league from everything else in the running. It's a beautiful object. Ware's sense of design and attention to detail are phenomenal, and the story itself was complex, moving and haunting.

Late Review gave it a little jokey dismissal and Tom Paulin said something witless along the lines of it wasn't as colourful or as funny as the Beano - which is a little like saying that Paulin's poems don't rhyme as nicely as Pam Ayres's. Why does the novel maintain its exalted status as the pinacle of human achievement? Any idiot can write one: you just need patience and a massive ego. It seems extraordinary, when we are surrounded by so much visual information, when we rely on the visual to tell us so much, and the lines between comics, films, advertising, TV and computers are becoming so blurred, that comics should still be considered trivial in some quarters.

One brief flick though this book should be enough to convince even the most visually impaired poet that in the right hands comics can be enormously powerful. There's a huge range of styles on display, from obsessive, almost mundane, autobiographical pieces, to historical pieces, comics about Kierkegaard, the twin towers, the Bosnian war, prisoners on death row, and daft little gags about nuns and squirrels.

I could reel off a list of contributors, but while many will be recognisable to comics fans - people like Charles Burns, the Hernandez Brothers or Daniel Clowes - the average reader probably won't have heard of any of them. A couple will be familiar: Art Spiegelman, for instance, best known for Maus, and the grand old master Robert Crumb (good to see that he still follows the same old sexual obsessions). But no matter, because this book is an excellent introduction to modern American comics. Sometimes its diversity can be a little bewildering, and it can be frustrating reading just a few pages of longer works, but it adds up to a fairly complete picture of what's going on out there and should point you in the right direction to explore this stuff further.

This book should be bought by anyone with any interest in comics, modern art, in fact, in modern popular culture, full stop. And if you haven't read a comic in years, it can take you back to your childhood. You remember the joy of receiving an annual for Christmas? There always seemed to be just so much stuff in it. You'd flick through it, dip in and out of it, reading the odd page; and then you'd go back and read it all properly over the next few weeks. Well, you can relive that experience with this book. You won't like everything, and, as with those old annuals, there are some boring bits that aren't comics at all. Writing - words on a page with no pictures. Most of the written stuff seems pale and uninteresting next to the comics, though there is quite an interesting piece by John Updike, who apparently started life as a cartoonist, but eventually gave it up to write novels.

You sense a level of regret here - that Updike still thinks what cartoonists do is more admirable than what novelists get up to, and, looking through the pages of this book I can't help but agree. Comics will be around long after most literary novels are forgotten, and they'll show us what was going on in the world a lot clearer.